Smartcard technology is increasingly being adopted for a variety of financial transactions. By way of example, these include stored value, banking and point of sale applications, pay TV, pay phones, loyalty schemes, electronic tolling and electronic ticketing. Such systems generally utilise a smartcard issued to users, readers for the cards, hardware and software associated with the reader for performing a transaction, and in many cases, a communications link to a host system.
The term smartcard is used throughout this document to refer to all portable devices including a processing device and storing financial or identification information, including but not limited to devices meeting ISO standard 7816.
Current developments and proposals tend to utilise smart cards and transaction applications which are proprietary to particular developments. In order to use a card, customers must use a terminal which supports the particular system implemented on that card.
Prior Art FIG. 1 illustrates a typical system based on these techniques. Terminals 3A and 3B each support only a single scheme. Terminal 3C contains multiple applications, each residing in terminal 3C, which can each support a single scheme. Multi-scheme functionality is accordingly provided by having different applications to support each scheme resident in each terminal. This type of functionality will increasingly be required in new terminals. In the case of fixed location, relatively high cost terminals this requirement can readily be accommodated, as substantial processing and memory resources are available.
However, a further likely and intended outcome of stored value-type schemes is that low cost, potentially portable terminals will come into widespread use. According to conventional methodologies, these terminals would need to be either single scheme specific at best, or unacceptably expensive.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a smart card transaction system and terminal which enable the implementation of multiple schemes within a low cost terminal environment.